{"id":35325,"date":"2020-05-11T13:41:14","date_gmt":"2020-05-11T17:41:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/?post_type=emagazine&p=35325"},"modified":"2021-08-02T06:52:25","modified_gmt":"2021-08-02T10:52:25","slug":"florence-nightingale-data-scientist-header","status":"publish","type":"emagazine","link":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/secure-futures-magazine\/florence-nightingale-data-scientist-header\/35325\/","title":{"rendered":"200 years on, Florence Nightingale’s health data revolution has a new relevance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018The Lady with the Lamp,\u2019 English newspaper The Times christened Florence Nightingale in the mid-1850s. Illustrations showed her beaming rays of hope through nighttime visits to wounded soldiers in Crimea and India. She became a personification of virtue, popular in Queen Victoria\u2019s stiff-upper-lipped British Empire. This romantic portrayal might\u2019ve been itself radical because, at the time, nurses were thought uneducated, drunk and promiscuous.<\/p>\n

Nightingale\u2019s true legacy to healthcare was less in giving care and more in how she used data.<\/p>\n

She made sure numbers were collected, analyzed and presented in ways that could be immediately understood by those who could do something about the horrific scale of death from a preventable infection.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This same skillset matters more than ever in meeting healthcare challenges today.<\/p>\n

Nightingale\u2019s journey to the frontline<\/h2>\n

Although it was considered unladylike at the time of her upbringing, Nightingale persuaded her father to let her study math. She later taught herself the art and science of nursing, which her family opposed, and went on to be a supervisor to ill women in London\u2019s medical district, Harley Street.<\/p>\n

In 1854, she traveled to Crimea with a group of nurses to volunteer in the war effort. They were in for a shock. While the war was high tech for its time, with telegraphs, railways and high-explosive shells, medical conditions were dire. There were beds without blankets and patients stacked in hallways, covered in excrement and dodging scuttling flea-ridden rats. Overworked medics battled with limited supplies.<\/p>\n

Nightingale wrote to The Times describing the crisis, prompting Isambard Kingdom Brunel, top architect of the day, to design a prefabricated hospital<\/a>. It was shipped to the frontlines.<\/p>\n

Under Nightingale\u2019s watch, efforts to improve hygiene \u2013 particularly handwashing \u2013reduced mortality from 42 to 2 percent<\/a>. Her actions weren\u2019t born from experience or instinct, but from analyzing data.<\/p>\n

Nightingale invents the first infographic<\/h2>\n

Overworked medics in Crimea kept poor or no records, which meant obvious flaws in the system could go unnoticed. By starting a data-gathering team to record what was happening to patients, Nightingale built evidence that poor hygiene was killing more soldiers than the war itself. At the time, the theory that germs caused disease was not widely accepted.<\/p>\n

Nightingale always placed high importance on data. She was one of the first to understand the power of data visualization to communicate complex findings instantly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the 1850s, when newspaper ink was smudgy, Nightingale presented statistics in novel ways for the day, like the pie chart and her own Nightingale rose diagram, which she named a \u2018coxcomb\u2019 \u2014 a kind of circular histogram. It showed how patient mortality changed each season and which deaths were from preventable causes, like field hospital hygiene.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Florence Nightingale\u2019s most famous infographic, the rose diagram, was an original way to show statistics in its time<\/p><\/div>\n

She presented the coxcomb diagrams to the British government. They could understand the data without effort \u2013 a vast improvement on traditional statistic reports \u2013 and acted on it.<\/p>\n